Bill Of Rights Vs Civil Liberties Essay

When the founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights and the Constitution they did not want to create a government that would over power and abuse the people. Both documents ensured the peoples freedoms, right, liberties, and property. Just like the early forms of the constitution these concepts took time and had to change to adapt to the way of life. Civil liberties and civil rights are two different definitions in the government standards. Civil liberties are the limitations on government powers, intended to protect freedoms. Freedom of religion falls under this category. “The free exercise clause, on the other hand, limits the ability of the government to control or restrict religious practices. This portion of the First Amendment regulates not the government’s promotion

An exception to those freedoms is obscenity. Obscenities are acts or statements that are extremely offensive under current societal standards. The courts knew that situations would come up testing individual rights and obscenities, so they created “The Miller Test.” This test has three points to check for when defining obscenities, “(a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” (125). An example of that would be the Ku Klux Klan. The Ku Klux Klan is a hate group assembled by white supremacist that would harass black members of society. This is a great example of our rights as United States citizens. Under these freedoms we have the right to be a member of any religion, but the government will restrict these rights if they are infringing on others and their